


far beyond where we stand

by cosmic_llin



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Mentorship, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-05 00:41:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11566743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/pseuds/cosmic_llin
Summary: Episode tag forRandom Thoughts. Kathryn helps B'Elanna recover from her experience with the Mari.





	far beyond where we stand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [parcequelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/parcequelle/gifts).



The mess hall is generally quiet by 3am, but this time as Kathryn enters she spots B’Elanna, leaning by the window with her hands wrapped around a coffee mug, looking out.

For a moment Kathryn thinks of turning right back around, but she’s not a coward, and she knows that if she left now it would be more about her own guilt than respect for B’Elanna’s feelings. She’s pretty sure B’Elanna has already forgiven her, maybe never thought to blame her in the first place, and that just makes her even more guilty.

Instead she comes in and walks towards her, trying to tread loudly to let her know she’s approaching. B’Elanna turns.

‘Captain!’ she says.

‘Can’t sleep?’ Kathryn asks.

B’Elanna shakes her head. ‘You neither?’

‘Sometimes, even for me, there’s such a thing as too much coffee.’

She doesn’t mention that she drank cup after cup to stay awake the entire time B’Elanna was in Mari custody, searching for a way to save her. It wasn’t enough and she doesn’t want B’Elanna to know. Her eyes are burning from tiredness now.

‘How are you feeling?’ Kathryn asks, when B’Elanna doesn’t say anything else.

She shrugs. ‘Fine, I guess. The Doctor says they barely got started, so aside from a little fuzziness in my memory of the incident itself, I shouldn’t really be affected.’

‘… but?’

‘But that memory was _mine_. They had no right to it! And they’ve never performed this procedure on a Klingon-Human brain before – what if they damaged something without knowing it?’

‘I’m sure the Doctor…’

‘It’s not that I don’t trust the Doctor. I just can’t make myself believe it. I feel like I can’t trust my own memory.’

B’Elanna sighs and looks out at the stars.

_I should have done more_ , Kathryn doesn’t say. _I should have screamed and broken down doors, I should have fought to the death rather than let them lay a hand on you_.

She thinks about how she told Tom that they had to respect the Mari’s laws, and made it sound like it was about their duty as Starfleet officers, the Prime Directive, when she knows that if she thought she had the slightest chance of getting B’Elanna out of there without bringing punishment down on the whole crew, she would have done.

They’re just one ship. One small, powerless ship. And she is a small, powerless captain who can’t even protect the people in her care.

She doesn’t say any of that.

‘How can I help?’ she says, instead.

‘Oh… captain, it’s all right, you don’t have to…’

‘B’Elanna… I’m offering as your friend, not as your captain. If there’s anything I can do to help, I’d like to.’

B’Elanna nods. She thinks about it for a minute. ‘I asked Harry about this,’ she says, ‘but all he did was tell me that I didn’t need to worry about it. But I am worrying about it, and Harry can’t change that. I want someone to test me.’

‘Test you?’

‘I want to be sure for myself that they didn’t take any important memories – anything about the ship’s systems. I don’t want to find out in an emergency that I can’t do what I need to do. I don’t want to let the ship down.’

Kathryn’s heart squeezes painfully, but she smiles. This, at least, she can do. ‘B’Elanna, you could never let Voyager down. But of course I’ll help you.’

* * *

Kathryn rearranges her schedule for the next few weeks, and they meet after their shifts the next day in B’Elanna’s quarters, which she notices are almost unnaturally tidy. But then, it isn’t as if she’s spent all that much time in here. Perhaps B’Elanna is just a tidy person. She certainly keeps a very neat engine room when they’re not in the middle of a crisis.

‘Captain, come in!’ says B’Elanna. ‘Would you like anything to drink, or a snack?’

She accepts a glass of water, and they get to work at B’Elanna’s desk.

‘I want to start from the basics,’ B’Elanna insists. ‘It’s the only way to be sure. Think of me as a first-year cadet.’

‘Never,’ says Kathryn. ‘But I’ll certainly quiz you with that in mind.’

They work through the syllabus, and B’Elanna’s answers are swift and confident. She doesn’t hesitate for a moment, not on a single question, and by the end of the evening they’ve covered most of the first year of the Academy’s engineering track.

* * *

‘All right,’ says Kathryn, kicking off her boots as she enters B’Elanna’s quarters and moving aside B’Elanna’s discarded jacket so that she can sit on the sofa. ‘Where did we get to?’

It’s been weeks of this now – B’Elanna’s “graduated” from the Academy with the expected flying colours, risen through the ranks of junior engineering crew, demonstrated a firm grasp of the knowledge and experience the captain would expect from any chief engineer in Starfleet, and now they’ve moved on to the specifics of Voyager herself.

‘I think we’d moved on to the secondary system schematics,’ B’Elanna says, pulling one up on her PADD. ‘Test me?’

Kathryn scrolls around the schematic at random, stops. ‘How many regulators make up the nadion scanner assembly?’ she asks.

‘Twelve,’ says B’Elanna, with confidence.

They go back and forth for a while, until B’Elanna’s satisfied. They move onto the next schematic.

‘Where’s the backup control module for the replicator safety protocols?’ asks Kathryn.

‘Secondary command console seven, deck nine, section four,’ B’Elanna responds.

Kathryn frowns. ‘Are you sure?’

For a moment B’Elanna looks stricken, but then her face clears. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m positive.’

Kathryn peers at the schematic again, thinks for a moment, taps in a request for more information on the PADD.

‘You know, I think you’re right?’ she says. ‘It’s been years since I’ve had the time to go over all this. You work with these systems every day. It’s no wonder you know them better than I do.’

‘Captain, I’m sure I don’t…’

‘I’m sure you do. And it’s a good thing too – when I think about the number of times you’ve saved this ship and its crew, pulled impossible solutions from nowhere and gotten us out of danger, or solved problems that looked like they would be fatal… I sleep better at night knowing that, if I can’t be in Engineering myself, there’s somebody down there I trust.’

B’Elanna flushes. ‘Thank you, captain. That means a lot.’

Kathryn leans over and pats B’Elanna’s hand. ‘I think it’s time we took a break. Let’s walk down to Engineering and you can catch me up on everything down there?’

‘Sounds great,’ says B’Elanna.

They replicate coffees and take them along, and B’Elanna guides Kathryn around Main Engineering. She barely has time to come down here these days unless it’s an emergency, or they’re working on a particular project. It’s been years since she’s worried about the day-to-day running of the place, and watching the way the crew respond to B’Elanna’s presence, the way they know their work and each other, is proof that she’s right not to.

When B’Elanna’s shown her the warp drive upgrades they’re working on, the replicator efficiency project she’s assigned to some of the more junior staff, and the energy consumption review results, they take the lift to the upper floor and lean on the rail with their lukewarm coffees, looking down at the quiet buzz of activity.

‘They’re a good team,’ says B’Elanna, gesturing downward.

‘With a good leader,’ Kathryn says.

‘You know,’ says B’Elanna, ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever really told you how much I appreciate you offering me this position. I didn’t at first because I was so sure I was going to screw up and ruin it, and then I guess it just never came up. So… thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ says Kathryn.

B'Elanna meets her eyes for a few moments, then looks away, this time up at the warp core stretching into the ceiling.

'She's a good ship,' she says. 'I know we've both worked hard, but I think Voyager deserves some of the credit too.'

'She's a tough little ship,' Kathryn agreed. 'Tenacious. Like her chief engineer.'

'And her captain.'

The laugh comes easily to Kathryn, all the easier for seeing the sparkle in B'Elanna's eyes, the comfortable affection in the way she talks about the ship. She may have allowed B'Elanna to be hurt, but she's healing, and she thinks it's going to be all right.

'You know,' Kathryn says, 'I get the feeling you won't need many more of our study sessions - but would you mind if we kept them going, for me? Maybe just once a month, but I'd like to be sure I'm staying up to date and I can't think of anyone better to help.'

'Captain…’ says B’Elanna, and for a moment there’s a flash of that scared girl who came aboard three years ago, but it’s gone as quickly as it came. ‘I'd be happy to.’


End file.
